Applied Cognitive Psychology最新文献

This study examined the effects of prosecution and defense opening statements describing video evidence on mock jurors' perceptions and interpretations of that evidence and ultimate judgments. Materials were based on an actual case in which a police officer was tried for murder after fatally shooting an unarmed driver at a traffic stop. The incident was recorded on the officer's body-worn camera. Participants exposed to the prosecution's verbal framing of the video judged the officer to be significantly more responsible for the driver's death than those not so exposed. Partisan verbal framing also significantly affected what participants reported having seen, in some instances making them more likely to agree with factual statements that were unambiguously false. The effect of verbal framing on participants' responsibility judgments was mediated by its effect on their inferential judgments and emotional responses. Attitudes toward police also significantly affected responsibility judgments, inferential judgments, and emotional responses.

Successful correction of misinformation is complicated by the possibility of backfire effects where corrections may unintentionally increase false beliefs. Due to the conflicting evidence for the existence of backfire effects in the current literature, the present study investigated the influence of pragmatic licensing (i.e., contextual justification for communicating corrections) on the occurrence of backfire effects. Using text messages to manipulate the presence of misinformation and corrections about the meanings of novel words, we found evidence of a backfire effect occurring as a result of unlicensed negated corrections. Misinformation use was significantly greater when a correction was provided without licensing than when no information was provided at all. We suggest that the backfire effect observed in this study may be the result of a violation of the Gricean maxims of communication, and that this mechanism may help to explain the contradictory findings about the existence of backfire effects when correcting misinformation.

Children's failure to distinguish the literal and implied meaning of “Do you remember …” (DYR) questions can lead to misunderstandings and damage their credibility as witnesses. We examined 65 children's (4–10 years) responses to wh- and yes/no questions about a cartoon video. Questions probed about true, false, and unanswerable details. Question format was manipulated as a within-subjects variable: half the questions were asked directly and half were prefaced with DYR. Most children provided unelaborated “yes” or “no” responses (i.e., referential ambiguity) to DYR yes/no questions. Requests for clarification revealed children were twice as likely to indicate their referentially ambiguous responses were answering the explicit DYR question when asked about false details (24%) than true details (9%). Pragmatic failure (i.e., unelaborated “yes” responses to DYR wh- questions) was most often observed when questions probed about true event details. As age increased, children were less likely to demonstrate referential ambiguity and pragmatic failure.

Texting while driving (TWD) poses a significant hazard, particularly among young adults, as it requires simultaneous engagement in competing tasks. Despite widespread awareness of its dangers, drivers continue to engage in TWD. This study investigates the psychological and cognitive factors that influence TWD, employing the protection motivation theory (PMT). Structural equation modeling was conducted on a sample of 674 survey respondents aged 18–25. Factors influencing TWD behavior were revealed, including response cost, threat vulnerability, cognitive failure, self-efficacy, and threat severity. Response cost was the primary barrier. Notably, not all subdimensions of threat appraisal and coping appraisal have a direct impact on TWD; cognitive failures serve as a mediator solely between threat vulnerability and response cost. An understanding of TWD provides insights into the TWD behavior of young drivers. By integrating the PMT with cognitive failure, this approach informs the development of interventions and regulations aimed at discouraging TWD and improving road safety.

Formal education would promote symbolic number processing ability, but the relationship between non-symbolic number sense and mathematical education remains controversial. The current investigation hypothesized that non-symbolic number sense is independent from the limited human experience of mathematical education, while symbolic number processing could be influenced by related closely to mathematical education. Experiment 1 compared both non-symbolic number sense and arithmetic computation of undergraduates majoring in STEM fields and humanities. Experiment 2 compared homologous undergraduates from China and Kyrgyzstan in non-symbolic number sense and mathematical cognitive processing. Both of two experiments found that mathematical education was significantly associated with symbolic mathematics, but not with non-symbolic number sense. The results suggest that while mathematical education might improve symbolic mathematics, it does not alter non-symbolic number sense.